Who says superhero movies are the only ones that get to have epic runtimes? After pushing this year’s IT: CHAPTER TWO to the three-hour mark, Warner Bros. is yet again gearing up for another Stephen King epic with this year’s DOCTOR SLEEP. Intent on keeping bladders full to make you extra squeamish during the horror bits, the confirmed runtime for the sequel to THE SHINING clocks at 152 minutes – 2 hours and 32 minutes – which pushes it longer than the 146 minutes of the first Kubrick movie.
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The runtime has made it onto sites like AMC (via MovieWeb), and that puts it in line with the length of the first IT movie back in 2017. Director Mike Flanagan confirmed as much by retweeting a story about it and offering a smart viewing experience by writing, “Yeah, you may want to go with the SMALL soda…,” in the caption.
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Based on King’s sequel novel to THE SHINING, this new movie follows a grown-up Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor) who is still coming to terms with his psychic gifts and dealing with the horrors he experienced as a child. While the book doesn’t quite go as deep into the direct events of the original story, the new movie will go as far as to venture back to the Overlook Hotel as Danny confronts his past (and makes the movie easier to market). Including that angle while also not diminishing the story of the book was challenging, but in doing so, Flanagan hopes he makes both King and the fans happy.
"For us, and I think for a lot of the readers, when I first read the book, I loved what he did with [Danny Torrance], and I loved revisiting that universe. But I just had this real ache to go back to the Overlook," he said last month. "I was really bummed when the book didn't do that. And so for us, it was a question of, ‘How do we try to combine those two worlds in a way that's going to make Stephen feel really satisfied with what we did and also honor the legacy of the Kubrick film and what it means to cinephiles?’
DOCTOR SLEEP is in theaters on November 8.